Tonight's The Night

Tonight's The Night                                     3908 (47)

Friday, March 17, 2006-7:38 A.M.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!  I hope you all enjoy one of the true great drinking holidays, right up there with Super Bowl Sunday and the day before Thanksgiving.  Try not to drink too much green beer tonight, because green urine is scary...not as much as red urine, granted, but pretty scary in it's own right.

Getting ready to hit the trail of tears and a 10-11 hour drive home from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, up on Canada's front porch, I'm up good 'n' early.  I didn't have much faith in my ability to shake it out of the rack early today, but divine providence struck in the form of my good friend, Jimmy Hamm from 92.5 KISS F.M. in Toledo, Ohio.

Jimmy is one of the morning show hosts on the KISS F.M. station in Toledo, and when I played there a month ago, he hosted a night of comedy at Connxtions Comedy Club, and I was going to do a morning call-in bit, pretending to be a regular caller, but doing a totally set-up call.  It would have been funny, but I was suffering from a pretty bad cold at the time, and my cold medicine zonked me out, and I missed Jimmy's calls all morning.  So he called me yesterday, asking me if I'd be willing to do another call-in bit, which I jumped on, and he said he would call me at 7:15 today, which is great because it's like a wake-up call I didn't have to worry about.

The bit we did was for a segment they do called "First Time Friday" where callers call in and predict that they will "seal the deal" with their significant others over the upcoming weekend.  I imagine the female callers are pretty much slam-dunks, but for guys to call in and say that they'll be successful in the quest for the nookie, that's pretty cocky.  Jimmy called me and I posed as "Kyle," who predicted that he'll finally get some from his girlfriend "Shannon," and when they called me, I did an imitation of the cockiest guy I know, a friend of mine named Mark who works at the Comix Cafe in Rochester.  To give you some idea of the type of character that Mark is, my good friend Steve Burr (www.steveburrcomedy.com) once described Mark as "the closes thing to Fonzie that we've got."  Unfortunately, he also described me as "the closest thing to Al Delvecchio that we've got."  I guess that one got stuck in my craw a little, huh?

So I did the bit, and now I'm shaking off the cobwebs and getting ready to roll.  Last night was a pretty interesting show, all told.  I started off with a visit to the lounge to see the casino showroom here at Kewadin Resorts, and it was a pretty nice looking room....big stage, lots of seats, and assurance from the bartender that they usually fill up pretty good.  I went and had dinner at the buffet, which was a little substandard as far as casino buffets go, but better than any of the high-priced menu items the restaurant offered (you could tell they were pushing people towards the buffet...it's better profit because there's a lower food cost...oh, the things you learn when you work in a restaurant).  They comped my meal the night before, but no one mentioned a comp last night, and I wound up paying.

I tracked down the guy responsible for getting me my check, and jumped through all of the hoops required to get it cashed, and made my way back to my room, with about 40 minutes to shower and dress for the show.  When I met Coco, the Canadian Indian sound guy/host for the show, he mentioned that my dinner was supposed to be comped.  Damn!  That was $12.95 I'd rather have had in my pocket.

On the way down to the show, I caught Jan, the cashier at the restaurant, who I had struck up a conversation with as I had paid my bill.  I told her that I found out about the comp, and she got a manager to refund my dinner price.  It was a nice surprise to actually be able to get the money back, because this road trip is turning out to be less profitable than it looked when I booked it due to rising gas costs, and the lower gas mileage of my wife's car.

The show was packed, as advertised, and it was all senior citizens and college students, and heavy on the college students.  We started late, about quarter after nine, and approximately 20 seconds into my show, the speakers cut out and emitted the loudest puff of annoying sound I've ever heard in my life.  It sounded like a whale song more than feedback, and wouldn't stop until Coco came running over and disconnected the mic cord from the speakers.  There's nothing that digs a comedy hole like technical difficulties.

Problem corrected, I continued my act.  Within another minute, it happened again.  Coco disconnected the mic, and I put the mic in the stand and began doing the show without the mic, begging the audience to stay with me, that I didn't do a lot of sound effects that required the mic, but that every once in a while, I would do a bit that didn't sound particularly impressive, but that they had to play along like I was killing.  It was a moment of vulnerability, and they appreciated it and hung out with me.

While I did my act acappella, Coco rushed around like a roadie at a Bon Jovi concert hooking up another sound system.  At one point, he walked in front of me on stage, with no pretense of hunching down to be out of the way.  He was pretty drunk, not to be stereotypical, but he was also on painkillers from a snowmobiling accident, so he was high as a kite.  I broke his balls a little, and he felt it necessary to retort, which again, slowed things down for my part of the show.  I was supposed to do 35, and got off sometime around the 40 minute mark, factoring in the technical difficulties.

After the show, which headliner Mike Merryfield battled much of the same room dynamics as I did, weird crowd dynamic and the loss of much of the back of the room (no speakers back there), we both decided that this was too much work.  We parted company, and I went to the bar to have a Diet Coke.  I was chided by a drunk kid who wanted to know why I wasn't drinking.  The truth, which I happily told him, was that I was on medication and it didn't react well with alcohol.  He shared his life story with me, his pancreaitits, the accident that shattered his jaw, and the hard, manual labor job that he works at five days a week, and his military service.  The only thing I could say to the kid is "Damn straight!" and "You got that right!" which are the proper responses to a drunk guy who's trying to talk to you and make a point.  I ditched the kid and headed back out into the casino.

When I checked in, they gave me a few rolls of casino tokens, to play the slot machines for free.  I wound up winning $3.50, which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick or a kick in the ass with a frozen boot on your birthday in front of all of your friends.  I took my winnings over to a machine called "Deal or No Deal" after the game show starring Howie Mandel, and parlayed my winnings into another 10 bucks.  Hooray!  It was a small profit, but better a small profit than a large loss, eh?

I'm getting ready to start trucking, and on only about four hours of sleep.  It was good sleep, thanks to my CPAP machine, but I don't know at what point along the drive I'm going to start feeling the effects.  Caffeine will probably help, but I'll be ready for a nap when I finally get home.  Luckily, the weather is nice today, and hopefully I won't have to battle the winds like I did on the way up.

Hope your St. Paddy's Day is safe, and catch you again on Sunday!

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY